The UK riots, or, how misinformation causes everything
The UK riots, or, how misinformation causes everything
Engineering perception only goes so far
A massive attack on civil liberties is underway in the wake of a week of rioting in the UK. For politicians, the media, NGOs, and academics our old friend “misinformation” shares a large portion of the blame. It is the excuse that keeps on giving.
“Fake news sparks riots,” “Misinformation fuels riots,” “Misinformation Stoked Anti-Migrant Riots,” Protests “sparked by misinformation,” “Disinformation fuelling the UK far-right riots,” “How false claims about a mass stabbing led to a riot,” How disinformation spread to start a riot,” and “UK riots spurred by misinformation.” There are literally hundreds of articles of this type, seemingly extracted from the laziest of ChatGPT prompts.
The UK is talking of arresting and even extraditing people from other countries for misinformation. “You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false” said UK Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Parkinson. There are calls to expand the already regressive online safety bill and facial recognition, and the Counter Disinformation Unit, which targeted legitimate dissent during Covid, is being rebooted to monitor social media.
Misinformation was spread, particularly in the days when the name of the teenager charged with murdering the three young girls was withheld as per UK law. Once the identity of the alleged attacker was known (a British citizen born of Rwandan parents) the riots in no way abated. It was all fuel for the anti-immigration movement. The people leading the rioting weren’t information connoisseurs, they needed just enough true information to connect to real concerns; Tinderbox Britain did the rest.
It is quaint to think that had accurate information about the attacker been immediately known there would have been no viral outrage and protest. Information can direct where energy flows, but the energy and tension were long there. If it hadn’t been this event it would have been another soon enough.
If the roots and shoots of a society are green and healthy a spark thrown it is unlikely to do much damage. If the forest is dry you don’t need a bolt of lightning (real or imagined): a hot summer day is enough for combustion.
Indeed, despite a massive ramping up of progressive anti-racist and pro-immigration campaigns in the past decade, the UK appears to be more racist and anti-immigration than ever. Not only have anti-racism campaigns failed, but the all stick-no-carrot approach of the last decade arguably exacerbated tensions.
The purpose of blaming “misinformation” is that it deflects from the real issue: a great many Britons are not happy with the scale and results of immigration. According to Wikipedia, a record 1.26 million people arrived in 2022, and recent polls say just 9% of Britons are satisfied with the way the UK government is dealing with immigration.
You may decide that xenophobia and racism are the real causes of the unrest and that there is no legitimate criticism (even of the peaceable and democratic kind) to be had of migration and integration. That however does not change the fact that British society is deeply fractured. Do you put everything down to perception and continue with the same policies regardless? No matter how much you suppress and nudge you’'ll get the same outcome or worse without real material change, especially as economic conditions likely worsen.
The “misinformation” excuse just kicks the can down the road, and failing to have difficult conversations leaves the terrain open to the extremes. It was always magical to think that papering over such huge issues would work for any serious length of time. As Joe Biden found out recently, you can bend reality to your will for only so long. If there is an information culprit, it is the shutting down of conversation on difficult issues.
Fact-checkers and NGO workers are overwhelmingly of the post-modern progressive variety and generally supporters of large-scale immigration. For them too, the fault must not be laid at the scope and scale of existing policy. I have often tried to explain to my progressive friends that large-scale migration is a capitalist program, not an anti-racist one. But this progressive shift fits the broader one where progressives now largely support corporate and government authoritarianism, from Big Pharma to border closures.
At the same time, people like X CEO Elon Musk are not helping. Musk amplified an undeniably fake news story and is heightening tensions more broadly. Some adults in the room would be really handy right now.
Misinformation is new “the dog ate my homework” for politicians and the media class. The only real solution is hard and deeply uncomfortable conversations. Repress the conversation and you amplify the fringe. Creating sustainable policy solutions requires holding the conversation at the center, and not dismissing everything inconvenient as “misinformation”. The alternative is social Balkanisation and expanding authoritarianism.
The repressed always returns, and it is usually ugly.
Well said, thank you for this. I highly recommend these must-read essays on what almost no one dares to mention (and which is being deliberately censored) regarding the root cause of immigration and how exactly it is used by the corporate-capitalist billionaire ruling class https://johnspritzler.substack.com/p/censored-the-truth-about-mass-migration
And here https://www.pdrboston.org/illegal-immigration-what-should-we-
And finally, here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ueNWlMyUNy4
Immigration is another area where the corporate-capitalist billionaire abusers and deceivers rely on the historical-ignorance and superficiality of most people and how easy it is to emotionally-inflame & manipulate people (especially conservatives seem to be very easy to emotionally inflame & manipulate on this issue, from what I've noticed, by using the right trigger words and by presenting a very skewed and incomplete picture) into mis-identifying what is ACTUALLY happening and what are the root causes of immigration, and thus into screaming the billionaire's desired slogans that we're funneled into, WITHOUT inquiring into the root cause of how issues come into existence (who has time for that, right? Much easier to not inquire and just stay on the surface of things and repeat the ready-made slogans that are provided by the billionaire-paid influencers & narrative managers in one's echo-chamber)
Again, for an overview of the root causes of the issue, I highly recommend the essays above.
As you can see, immigration is truly the gift that keeps on giving for the capitalist billionaire ruling class. Not only do they massively financially profit from it but they also score huge political wins by cynically using it to advance the US vs THEM mentality of dehumanization and religious/ethnic division, fear & hatred which exploits people's most primal fears to elicit the desired emotions and keep the billionaires in power. It's a massive win on both accounts (financial & political) for the ruling class.
Immigration obviously doesn't just happen by itself, but is by and large deliberately generated by the crimes, abuse, trauma, exploitation, resource-theft, violence and atrocities of the corporate-capitalist ruling class in the global south (this is the part conservatives are never told by the propagandists & narrative managers in their echo-chambers) and is then literally used as a weapon against the 99%, against both working class non-westerners and working class westerners.
And as the ruling class always do with every single issue, they use also this issue to pit the 99% against each other.
The Big Money corporate-capitalists profit from their generated mass immigration in three significant ways -
The first is before immigration even starts. Becasue the corporate-capitalist billionaores have their representitives in government (whether conservative or liberal), the corporate-capitalists get to use public funds and the coercive power of government, and specifically the brutal force of its military, to advance their own narrow class interests (for their own enrichment and domination) across the planet, and especially in the resource-rich global south, often in collaboration with the local right-wing capitalist ruling-class abusers and tyrants in the specific targeted country (their actions are described in detail in the links above), thus bringing about profound devastation of families, communities and entire regions, forcing the poorest of the poor (the easiest target for capitalists because they have no voice or power in a corporate-capitalist oriented economy and judicial system) forcing the poorest of the poor to be displaced and seek safety and livelhood elsewhere.
Two, once the poor - who are displaced by Godless billionaire corporate-capitalists - arrive in the wealthy country (where they're told that a more safe life for them and their children should be possible) then the second part of their exploitation by the corporate-capitalist billionaires begins. The immigrants now serve to provide the corporate-capitalist billionaires with a cheap labor force which is easy to exploit because new immigrants are willing to work for little and are usually not unionized and are terrified of complaining or protesting their blatant exploitation by the capitalist billionaires, becasue the threat of deportation (back to un-safety for their children) always hangs over their head. The cruel, selfish, heartless Godless capitalist billionaires are very well aware of the precarious situation that the immigrants are in and take full advantage of it to exploit and squeeze as much as possible out of desparate people (whose communities were broken up by the same capitalist billionaire predators who now exploit them also in the new country that they fled to) who have no legal or social recourse against their profoundly powerful corporate-capitalist billionaire exploiters and abusers.
Another boon that this provides for the abusive capitalist billionares is that it forces the local (non-immigrant) poor and working class to accept lower pay and worse conditions in the corporate-capitalist industrial plantations, and to largely avoid complaining, striking or rebelling, becasue the capitalists now have an army of desperate powerless immigrants ready to call on to break the strike and replace any striking or disobedient or rebellious workers and to punish those who demand a living wage. It's a really MASSIVE WIN from the selfish God-ignorant perspective of the corporate-capitalist ruling class predators.
But that's not all. The corporate-capitalist billionaire ruling class get to extract another massive boon from the phenomena of mass immigration (that they themselves generated), perhaps the biggest boon of all. It is this - the corporate-capitalist billionaire ruling class have their paid influencers and professional narrative managers tell conservatives (who are kept profoundly ignorant of the facts and of the root causes of issues and of the course of events that brought us to this point, and therefore easily decieved and emotionally-manipulated) tell conservatives that the immigrants (disposessed and impoverished in their original families and communities by the greed & violence of corporate-capitist billionaires) that the immigrants are their enemy, are evil criminal people who came to hurt you, AND so you need to direct your anger and hate at them, PLUS don't forget that it's those famous evil scary monstrous communists who are responsible for the immigration (because, according to this line of propaganda, the legendary mythical creatures of scary monster diabolical communists - who of course run the world and who are lurking everywhere, they might be hiding under your bed right now - spend their days scheming up plans on how to hurt hard working righteous americans, because everyone knows that this is what evil scary monster communists do, of course) and so, conservatives are told by the paid billionaire propagandists, you need to vote for this "righteous" right wing conservative billionaire that we have ready for you here, becasue he really really loves you and really cares about you and really wants to save you and your family from the diabolical plans of the evil scary monster big bad communists who are lurking everywhere and who hate you and wish to hurt you in any way they can, especially through "their" evil immigrants (never mind that mass immigration is overwhelmingly generated by the abuse, greed and global violence of the corporate-capitalist thieves. You're not supposed to be aware of this, my dear deceived conservative, you're supposed to direct your anger, rage & hate at the scapegoats we provide for you, and support the "righteous" and so-called "anti elite" billionaires we provide for you as your protectors...)
So NOT ONLY do the ruling class corporate-capitalists MASSIVELY profit financially from immigration twice (BOTH in the initial destabilization and destruction of the lower classes original communities, described in detail the links above, AS WELL AS once the displaced migrants arrive in the empire's home country, described above), but the corporate-capitalist billionaire ruling class ALSO get to score massive political wins through it, by cynically pretending to be the ones who will protect "the people" from those scary evil immigrants, the very immigrants that the Big Money corporate-capitalists themselves brought in and use as a weapon against the working class..
So immigration is truly the gift that keeps on giving for the corporate-capitalist billionaire ruling class - they get to BOTH massively profit financially off of it, AND they get to use it as a way to politically shift the population to the right and convince many well-intentioned but totally unaware and propagandized people to vote for their billionaire representative into power (who works tirelessly to enrich the ultra-rich, to further the narrow selfish interests of the billionaire ruling class, funnel society's wealth upwards to the ultra-wealthy and cement the hierarchical class nature of society, the control of the few ultra-rich over the many) becasue the billionaire's narrative managers successfully sold hyonotized conservatives the fairytale narrative that this ruling-class billionaire is on their side and came to "fight the elite" and protect them from the dire threat of the monster evil immigrants, the very immigrants that the corporate-capitalist billionaire predators themselves largely generated through their abuse, greed, global violence, and destruction of the poorest families & communities in the global south, described in the links above.. Do you see how this works?!
PS. Of course, the liberal half is manipulated by the corporate-capitalist billionaire ruling class using other issues. I didn't go into that here.
Weaponization of migration to steal elections and destroy nations
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/weaponization-of-migration